Bedlam Waits
by rosaxx50
Summary: Niko's best friend was scarred beyond help. Tris has just told him she plans to follow the same career path. For the TPE: Writing Challenges August 2011: Modern AU, and MPP #52: Modern.


_"My best friend at Lightsbridge, when I went there? She went mad from the study of wind-scrying."_

**- Niko, _Shatterglass_**

* * *

><p><em>In the cooling breeze of the path away from the night market, Tris tells him she wants to use the medical degree she fought for in order to do a coroner's work. The entire way home, Niko questions her motivations and her plans, and in the falling silence as they leave crowds behind, hears in her replies nothing but reasons to answer 'yes'.<em>

_He does not want to answer 'yes'._

* * *

><p>He met her during the third week of his undergraduate degree. They were among only a small trickle of students still attending that particular lecturer's talks - hoping, maybe, that it would become less tedious. Or just understandable enough that the textbooks didn't do a better job of explaining.<p>

Every university, however renowned, he supposed, had to have their awful, boring teachers. He just hoped that there was only the one, among his.

She was doing a combined Law and Medicine degree; he was doing Law and Arts. But whereas Niko wasn't particularly attracted to a life dabbling in criminal minds, it was exactly that which made her eyes blaze.

"I want to UNDERSTAND what no one else but they can," she tried to explain, swinging her folders - their covers as glittery and as dazzling, as filled with stickers of The Beatles, as his were subdued - to emphasize each word. "I want to know what dead people would tell us, if only they could still speak." The clasp broke, sending papers flying everywhere: a flurry of white leaves caught by sly breeze.

She didn't blush. Niko would never recall a single instance in which she did; embarrassment, timidity, and shame were just words to her. (Even months later, when she was caught breaking into the guest house - on suspicion that someone pro-Nuclear Power was plotting there - her cheeks were pale.) Laughing, she stooped to pick up the slightly damp papers, one by one, gazing sadly but not despairingly at water-ruined pages.

* * *

><p><em>"You'll be dealing with the most twisted fractions of society," Niko warns. He swerves to avoid a bicycle loaded with ware, riding slowly in the opposite direction. "Once the body has been placed before you, you'll have to see through their eyes. Do your best to live through their deaths, and make every attempt possible to empathize. Not to mention," he adds darkly, "people coming after you, because you put their loved ones in prison."<em>

_"You survive being a psychologist," she points out, twisting her arms around her middle. She looks like she would bite her nails, if only Sandry, beautician and fashion designer, had not broken the habit._

_"So much of their waffle means nothing," Niko says, and is silent. They do not speak again until the buzzing yellow lights of his apartment corridor flicker above them, shadows fading in and out of stained focus. "You're determined to do this?"_

_Through her horn-rimmed glasses, Tris makes a face, as though to say, Do you even need to ask?_

* * *

><p>Afterwards, they kept in contact when they could: difficult while she was doing her forth-year hospital rounds, no easier when they'd both graduated and phone-calls on the job were greeted with stiff disapproval. Niko discovered he had a taste for traveling, and bringing to light cases that slipped through the cracks. Her tone became increasingly darker, and more distracted, as she visited a succession of crime scenes.<p>

But that banked fire was still there, that bright determination tarnished yet failing to be stomped out, until she was thirty, and he had just returned to the country. She was more distracted than ever when he called; when he inquired, she refused to meet him.

* * *

><p><em>"Women are being murdered," Tris reminds him, unnecessarily. "They deserve better than to have the council try to hush it up. I'm the only one not too afraid to do something about it." She holds up a hand to ward off the words she knows, from long experience, stand on the tip of his tongue. "I know it gives me no authority here. I'll let Dema collect the evidence. But we need the knowledge."<em>

_Niko does not answer. Silently, he unlocks the door. Leaving Tris hovering in the doorway, he walks into his barely unpacked study. The small volume for which he reaches is hidden beneath giant tomes of unrelated knowledge, but he could not have failed to know - as if through a sixth sense - its location._

_When he shows it to Tris, his student's eyes widen in delight. "Niko! You have a copy of 'An Anthology of Lies' and you never told me?"_

_Niko regards her heavily. He cannot stop the automatic reaction to smile with her, though. "My fears for you are real, you know. My best friend, when I went to Cambridge? She studied and worked as a coroner. Her enemies broke her."_

_He splays his fingers over the book's leather cover, caught in the memory of a smaller hand passing it to him; eventually, he shakes it off. Tris's hand looks very different holding the book, than his friend's did. (His memory is, obviously, perfect; the discrepancies are real, not imagined.)_

_"Perhaps you will be less reckless." Niko makes it an order despite the hopelessness of being obeyed. "Either way, I suspect, just like her, you would not listen to any arguments of mine."_

* * *

><p>"It's better that way," she said; he recognized at last that the tremor in it was from fear.<p>

"Let me be the judge of that," he said sternly. Young children had quivered under that tone of voice, when combined with his most unimpressed dark glare.

She was not a child, and she had been his friend for many years. "I don't think so. I'm busy."

The phone connection broke, leaving Niko staring at the handle, and the dial. Resisting the urge to stick his fingers and twist in her number, Niko set the handle down.

His name was becoming well-known, and his prowess as a psychologist was being reported. Golden Eyed, the media called him, for his ability to see right through people (with more than one joke thrown in about how he did not fit anyone's mental image of James Bond). There were five appointments lined up just that morning.

Two appointments in, he canceled the rest without a second thought, when his friend was reported missing.

* * *

><p>The police didn't take her family into protective custody. It didn't occur to them to do so, up until the next day, when they, too, disappeared.<p>

They found her family's body in the Thames River - all the way in London - a week later.

They didn't find her. She arrived on the doorstep of a small county's police station, bloodless, teeth chattering, and refusing to say a word. She had no answers even for Niko, who used his connections, his fame, and his impetuous air of authority to gain a foot into the investigation.

What they knew about what had happened to her, they learnt later from her captors. She watched the news reports on her family's death, wordless, as white as death, until someone had the sense to shut it off. When she faced the men who'd killed family, months afterwards, her only reaction was equally wordless: scrambling up, pale, except for her eyes - dark and wild.

And angry.

She would have leapt for them, if she hadn't been caught. Police, obviously reluctant, dragged her away with blood under her nails.

And Niko remembered, sick to his stomach, that while she'd been left unmarked, her family's wounds had not been made by the trip into the Thames.

She managed to say enough during the trial to sentence her captors for life. The deadly case she'd been working on, before, did not have her as a witness; another coroner took over the task of explaining the discoveries that had led to her capture.

* * *

><p><em>Tris leaves, eventually, with promises to text him if something comes up. She has a child to shield, while the barely corporeal Child Protection Agency gets its act together. Maybe her foster-siblings to call, with news. But Niko's memories do not fall away as easily; they keep him company, all the way through the long, sleepless night of worry.<em>

* * *

><p>She spent the rest of her life in the stark white of hospital, this time on the other side of its locked doors.<p> 


End file.
